*This transcript is produced using transcription software and reviewed for quality. Despite our best efforts, some passages may be incomplete or contain errors due to audio quality or software limitations.*
Matthew
Hello and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Friends, today we’ve got an exciting topic, but first I want to just say a word about the future of this podcast. As you know, we’ve been trying out some new things, talking about poker, talking about some other ideas. And Paul and I have decided that we are going to be bringing this chapter of Superhero Ethics to a close. It doesn’t mean immediately. We’re basically going to do an episode today, and then next week we’re gonna do an episode taking a deep look at what the questions are that we’ve been asking throughout these many years of discussing superhero ethics, and trying to come up with some conclusions, whether that’s answers or more questions or just different ways, or just reaffirming the old ways of looking at these kinds of questions. Kind of coming up with a framework, and then using that framework for our last 10 to 12 episodes, where we’re gonna take individual characters and really do a deep dive on them. Most of those are gonna be from the comic book, sci-fi, fantasy kind of world. Probably a couple of them won’t be. I imagine at least one or two are gonna come from The Wire, which is, I think for myself, and I think I can speak for Paul, one of our favorite examinations of the idea that maybe dividing the world into heroes and good guys and bad guys doesn’t actually work. But we’re gonna do this as a way of looking at those questions in all these different kinds of media. What’s gonna come after that? I’m not sure yet. It might be that that’s going to be the end of Superhero Ethics. It might be that that’s going to be the end chapter, and then we’re gonna relaunch Superhero Ethics with a new framework. We’re talking about maybe looking at one particular show or movie and looking at it through that frame. I’m not sure yet. But I’m really excited about this last chapter, about ending this chapter that’s been going on for however many years. There’s gonna be a lot more about that in next week’s episode. But for now, I want to talk to you about two pieces of media that Paul and I have both been watching recently that tie into a topic we really care about, and it’s really relevant to the kind of stuff we’ve been discussing, because you know we care about sports. We care about how sports is portrayed, both in real life media and in fictional media. And we talk about issues of gender and discrimination and justice and things like that. Well, this summer we just got to the end of the Women’s Professional Baseball League, which was an attempt to bring back women’s professional baseball, not softball, in a real way. It was, I think, a success in a lot of ways, and we have a lot to say about how that was covered and how that was talked about, in good and bad ways. But of course, if you know much about movies, especially if you were alive in the early 90s or have paid any attention to sports movies, feminist movies, anything like that, you probably remember a movie called A League of Their Own, which was about the fact that this is not the first time there was a women’s professional baseball league. I think there have been a couple of other attempts, certainly in other parts of the world too, but the first attempt took place during World War II, when the men were off at war and people wanted to fill the professional baseball stadiums, and so they founded a women’s professional baseball league, which was memorialized in that movie by Penny Marshall, A League of Their Own. So we’re gonna tie all that together, talk about how women’s baseball and women’s sports are portrayed, what the ethical ramifications are, and how that’s all talked about. Paul, just throwing it to you. You’re a big baseball fan. Where have you been on women’s baseball?
Paul
Let’s see. Well, when I first became interested in baseball, I was seven, almost eight. I had friends who were into it, and that was kind of what drew me into it. But my mom was the baseball fan in my family. My dad was aware of baseball and whatever. My mom actually moved to New York in 1969.
Matthew
Oh yeah, good time for the Mets.
Paul
And so she had kind of gone away from baseball as a kid. She played baseball, right? She played baseball, not organized Little League or whatever, because they didn’t allow girls.
Matthew
Right.
Paul
But you know, she and a bunch of her friends, some of whom were girls, some of whom were boys, probably her siblings, would go out in the backyard and back lot, and they’d just play baseball, right? So this was a thing she did growing up. She had a Mickey Mantle glove or whatever. She was a Yankees fan back then.
Matthew
I won’t hold that against her.
Paul
Yeah, exactly. And so basically, I played a little catch and whatever with my dad and my mom, but then my dad died when I was eight. So really most of my childhood baseball memories with a parent were with my mom. She would hit fungoes to me and throw ground balls and we’d play catch. She’d be the one who would take me to the batting cage if I was gonna go to the batting cage, and take me to Little League. So baseball for me was always more of a mother and son thing, right? Which I think is atypical, but certainly not unique, right? And my Little League was all boys, but the Upper West Side Little League, which I think… did you play there, on the Upper West Side?
Matthew
I played in the East Side league, but it was also co-ed, like the West Side.
Paul
Okay, yeah, the West Side. So at the time, growing up in the eighties and early nineties, there were girls in baseball in New York. And then in 1992, A League of Their Own came out, and that was maybe the first I heard about the league itself, which says something, I think, about baseball history and how it’s covered. But they were inducted into the Hall of Fame, right? And I’m not sure if then or later, there were at least three Black women who were inducted into the Hall of Fame, who weren’t allowed to play in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, right? But did play in the Negro Leagues, basically co-ed, right?
Matthew
So yeah, not any specific women’s Negro League. They just played. They were good enough to be able to play for the bigger league teams.
Paul
Yeah, exactly. And so I’ve always had an interest in baseball for a long time, and I never thought that women couldn’t play baseball, right? That always seemed weird to me. And I always felt like at some point that will happen, right? Because there was an understanding of, well, they didn’t allow Black people in Major League Baseball until 1947, and a lot of these barriers, it seems to me, get broken down over time. I may have written a piece of flash fiction which, spoilers, takes place in a major league baseball game, and the last line is the proud parent watching his kid close out the game, saying, “That’s my girl,” or something, right? So I guess I’ve had an interest in that being a thing, but not something that I’ve really done anything about, right? And so last year, when I heard that there was going to be a women’s professional baseball league, I was like, “Oh, that’s cool.” And just to be clear, this is the first women’s professional baseball league in the United States since then, right? I think Japan has a professional baseball league for women. Maybe there’s one in Korea. I’m not sure. And then in the US independent leagues, there are women who have played in those, at least some of whom were in this league, the WPBL.
Matthew
Of course, there have been both collegiate and professional level softball teams for some time, with softball being in many ways very similar to baseball, but still being a sport that was specifically… in the same kind of way that happened to a lot of sports, like women’s lacrosse has different tackling rules and things like that. For a while, a number of sports had a women’s version that was considered gentler, and softball kind of became its own game because the ball was different. Like the ball in women’s basketball was a different size than in men’s basketball for a long time, and things like that.
Paul
Yeah, and the idea that there’s women’s softball but men’s baseball, it’s like, what’s up with that? Because I never liked softball. I don’t play it, I didn’t like playing it. I would play it occasionally, and I was like, this is dumb, let’s use a hardball, right? You can just hold it and throw it in a different way. It feels more natural. And that’s not me saying I think softball is actually bad. It’s saying I don’t like it, and I think it’s ridiculous that women aren’t playing baseball. But they are, and they have been all this time, but without opportunities to do that on a big stage. And to me, seeing this was just awesome, to see that this was a thing now, right? And I have a lot of hope that it will grow. I think it was a little bit of a bumpy presentation, and we’ll get into that some, right? And I don’t know how much I actually would have watched it this year, because the season started right when I kind of buried baseball and was like, “Okay, I need to put baseball away for the rest of the year,” which, thank you, New York Mets, you made that much easier. And then you actually generously offered to get my mom a subscription to be able to watch it, which we both thank you for.
Matthew
And it’s streaming on ESPN, by the way. I think it’s only like 15 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month or something, and I think they still have all the games streaming. I don’t know how much longer they will, but they do.
Paul
Yeah, and we’ll get to that too. I don’t know about 15 bucks a month, but we’ll get to it. That whole thing about the delivery is complicated. But being able to share watching this with my mom and with you has been gratifying. It’s been satisfying to be able to see, like, this is professional women’s baseball, and it exists in the United States. I love that it exists in Japan too, but I don’t know how to watch any of the games. So yeah, that’s my not-so-short intro.
Matthew
No, it’s good, and I’ll say it’s pretty different than mine, because my mother liked sports, but she was a football fan. Very much. The New York Jets were her team. She would enjoy watching other sports, but mostly baseball and basketball were things that I watched with my dad. And Paul had a much more athletic childhood than I did. I quickly realized that I was much more likely to become a GM than a professional player, so I was much more interested in the trades and the stats and stuff like that. But I played some Little League on co-ed teams until I was maybe 12 or 13 or so. But it was my dad who taught me that kind of stuff. And even with my mom being interested in football, she also was never interested in playing. She was interested in watching and talking about it, and kind of pretending, as a coach, what would you have called, a run or a pass. Football in a lot of ways is one of the best for that kind of thing, because if you really know baseball, you can get into, do you throw a curve or a slider on two and one with this guy, but your knowledge has got to go pretty deep. But the ability to talk about, okay, it’s third and two, do you throw a pass, do you run inside, that’s a much more accessible conversation. I was probably a kind of traditional guy and did not really think much about women being athletes. And in one of the most embarrassing moments I had, though I did learn a lot from it, in high school, in ninth grade gym, we did a basketball section, and there was a pretty girl in the group that I was in, because it was a co-ed gym class. We were supposed to play basketball, and I tried to explain zone defense to her, knowing almost nothing about it, and she kind of laughed at me and then pointed out that she’d been on the women’s team all through middle school and was now starting on the JV women’s high school team. So I ate a lot of crow that day.
Paul
Boysplaining.
Matthew
Yeah, very much boysplaining, mansplaining.
Paul
Perfect term.
Matthew
Or whatever you would call it. Yeah, no, exactly. But I think I still was in that idea of, okay, but the men are bigger, the men are faster. So I just never really cared much until I got to college, where, oddly enough, being a large person with a lot of heart and not necessarily the most athletic nimbleness is pretty damn good for rugby. So I played rugby all through college and got in much better shape. But still, hand-eye coordination, if you’re supposed to smash into people, not so important. So I was great at rugby, had a lot of fun playing, and we had a women’s team at my college that was just as good as the men’s, and in a couple of years better. They traveled with us, and our coach coached both of them, and it was really important to him for the men’s team to go to the women’s games and support the women. That really shifted my head a lot, especially because of rugby. And I think I’ve said this before, and I think this is now changing, especially with women’s professional baseball, but it was the only team sport where the rules were the exact same for the men as for the women. The field was the same size, the ball was the same size, the tackling and contact rules were the same. Women’s professional baseball is getting close to that, but it was seven-inning games instead of nine-inning games. I don’t think that’s because of women’s frailness. I think it’s because they’re trying to start something in a time of short attention spans. But the point being that rugby really got me into thinking about that and caring about it. Somewhere in there, in high school, I think I’d watched A League of Their Own, and I thought it was good, and kind of like you, I hadn’t known about it. I thought that was kind of awesome. But I don’t think I walked out of that movie thinking, “Oh, I want to see more women’s sports.” And we’ll talk about that. I think there’s a lot of things about how we look at the movie today, but also just the sexist kid that I was at that time. So the rugby thing helped me, and then especially in recent years, since I’ve moved to Minnesota, where there’s a very big sports culture, and some of the women’s teams are very, very good. Our college women’s hockey team has won the Frozen Four for women a number of times in the last couple of years, or at least been in the Frozen Four. I think they’ve won two times in the last 10 years or something like that. The Lynx, the women’s WNBA team, is very good. The family that I married into is full of sports fans, many of whom are women, many of whom are just as big into women’s sports as men’s sports. And so I really got into that. I really enjoyed women’s rugby in the Olympics and some of that stuff. And so when I saw the women’s professional baseball league was happening, it was kind of this perfect storm, because I love baseball, I love talking to Paul and also to Paul’s mom about baseball, and there’s not really men’s baseball that’s worth talking about right now. So I just was like, I want to check this out, and it turns out it was great to watch. And I think there’s often a thought of, okay, but it’s not gonna be as good. And the fact is, yes, the average fastest pitch is gonna be slower than the fastest pitch for the men. But beyond that, there’s almost no difference. It’s still running and catching and fielding and hitting, and everything else is basically the same. And I like pitchers who throw in the 70s as much as in the 90s. I kind of don’t love that right now in Major League Baseball, the only way to play is to throw 99 miles an hour and then have no arm after three years. I think 70-mile-an-hour curveballs are fun to watch too. So yeah, I really loved it, and I was frustrated that it wasn’t better produced and better out there, and that’s part of why we wanted to talk about this.
Paul
Yeah, for sure. I just want to talk about the seven-inning game thing very briefly. When they were talking about introducing the pitch clock, or coming up with ways of making Major League Baseball games shorter, one of the weirdest suggestions I heard was to just make them seven innings. And my first reaction was, huh. I feel like my instinct is to hate that idea, but I kind of don’t. Because if you’re gonna make the game shorter, just make the game shorter. There’s no real reason that it has to be nine innings. I guess the idea behind nine innings to me is, well, you have nine batters, and if you throw a perfect game, you have to get everybody out thrice. That’s basically it. But I played seven-inning games. In Little League, it’s mostly six innings, and then the older Little League was seven innings, and college baseball is seven innings, and when they do doubleheaders in minor league baseball, seven innings. And they actually had seven-inning games in Major League Baseball in 2020 when they played doubleheaders, because of COVID. So there’s nothing wrong with just doing seven innings. And I do think a fair amount of it is about… these are teams of 15 or 16 players, I think. So you don’t have that many pitchers. And if you’re playing several days a week, the longer the games are, the more innings you have to throw, and the more wear that puts on arms. And sure, they’re not throwing 95 miles an hour, which is kind of the point at which the UCL starts to go, the elbow ligament that results in Tommy John surgery. But I think it’s a good choice. I think it ends up in a good game length. And this is a league where it was very hitter-friendly. And I have some quotes actually from my mom that I can sprinkle in throughout.
Matthew
Let me just respond to the thing on the innings first. I think I disagree. I do really like the symmetry of nine innings and the three outs and three batters and all that kind of stuff. But I’ll also say it is totally arbitrary. There’s nothing that makes baseball about nine innings or seven innings or ten innings, or the bases being 90 feet or whatever. And to me, the most important part is that it was not because it’s women that they did seven innings. If they were starting a New Zealand professional baseball league, maybe they already have one, I don’t think so, but if they were, you might well get a men’s professional league that starts with seven innings for the exact same reasons, because of attention spans and a small number of players and stuff like that. So to me, that’s mostly the point. In the past, and in some other sports, a lot of times the ball and things are changed because of gender, and the seven-inning one is not because of that.
Paul
Is that a statement from someone somewhere, or is that your inference?
Matthew
It is my inference, based on the fact that they have publicly stated, as you just discussed, a number of legitimate reasons that have nothing to do with gender for why it was seven innings.
Paul
Sure, yeah. So I do think the game is fairly different from Major League Baseball, right? On the one hand, baseball is baseball, and it’s just really fun to watch people who are passionate about the game, who love playing the game, play the game. And if they’re gonna do that, and that results in some sort of entertainment product, they should get paid to play the game, and they do, and that’s great. I do think there’s a lot of differences in the game, but that’s not so much women’s versus men’s baseball. That’s this exact league versus Major League Baseball, which is ridiculous. When people talk about players and they’re like, “Oh, so-and-so is a scrub,” it’s like, do you know how good you have to be at baseball to be a bad major league baseball player? And in order to get there, the player pool is from so many countries across the world, right? From so many kids who grew up playing, through multiple levels of minor leagues, with so much technology available. And what happens, I think, is that the level there is so high because of all this. It’s a combination of resources and opportunity, and then being able to sift through so many players, right? So if you were trying to compare the level of play, it’s a ridiculous exercise, if you’re trying to do that in terms of men versus women, which I know we’re not trying to do, right? I’m not even gonna do that. But the point being, whatever the games look like now, as long as they keep going and they keep building infrastructure for girls to play baseball and for women to have opportunities in baseball, it’s not gonna look the same in five years. If you went back and saw 1920s Major League Baseball, you’d be like, these guys are terrible, right? And that doesn’t mean they were terrible. It’s just that they didn’t have the resources that players do now. So I think as the league gets built out, as there are more reps at a higher level, that’s how the level improves.
Matthew
I mean, I said the thing about pitching. The idea that women will be throwing 95 at some point in time is completely feasible. I think people often look at this idea that men are statistically, overall, bigger or faster or stronger and stuff like that, and those are statistics in the aggregate. You still have women who are gonna dunk on me every single day, because they’re rarer, but still much taller than I am, and same thing with arm strength and anything like that. And I’ll admit I don’t know a huge amount about this, so I’m speaking in generalities, but I did some digging on this to make sure I’m generally right. What happened with women’s soccer is a really good example of how that would work, because I think it’s not only about it being much more available and there being more reps at the professional level. To me, the biggest thing is gonna be how many girls watched it this summer and then said, “You know what? Actually, I am gonna play Little League,” and said to their parents, “What do you mean I can’t keep playing baseball after I age out of Little League? What the hell is wrong with that?”
Paul
Yeah.
Matthew
Because that’s exactly what happened with soccer. The US Olympic team, because there were women playing in college and it was good, but there weren’t very many, but it was a big deal. They won, it was huge. We all remember a number of the people who played on that team, and little girls around the country and also around the world were really inspired and started going out for Little League versions of soccer and stuff like that, and then there’s school soccer, and it became the huge thing it is today. And we already have little bits of that. One of the things I think was really cool is, if you pay attention to sports news, the name Mo’ne Davis may ring a bell for you. About six, seven, no, probably eight or ten years ago, I don’t remember the exact date, she was a big deal because she was one of the stars of a team that made it to, I think, the Little League World Series. They might have won. I looked up an article about it a couple days ago, but it was behind a paywall, so I could only find the headline. So I’m sorry, I’m bad with details here.
Paul
It was 12 years ago, just to interject.
Matthew
Twelve years ago, thank you. And she was fantastic, but the point is that it was considered very noteworthy because, yes, there were girls on these Little League teams, but generally not on the teams that made it that far, as stars, as the really big players. But of course, then she fell off a cliff, because she couldn’t go play high school ball. But she obviously kept playing baseball. I don’t know if she may have also played softball, and I’m kind of curious to hear about the adjustment from one set of skills to the other. But either way, she has kept up her love of the game, and she went on and was a star in the Women’s Professional Baseball League. And I think that’s just such a great story.
Paul
Oh, she got the first hit of the league.
Matthew
Yeah, that’s fantastic. I love that.
Paul
And she was known as a pitcher in Little League. She threw a shutout.
Matthew
Yeah, which is… because it’s not many players, but also, in some ways, it’s not good. The facilities and the training and all that aren’t to the point yet where people are being really pushed into specializations. So if you like the fact that Shohei Ohtani plays both pitching and hitting, you’re gonna like a lot of the women’s professional league, because a lot of the best hitters are also pitchers, and vice versa.
Paul
Yeah, for sure. It’s definitely fun to see all the two-way players and everything. So I do have a very brief story about my niece and baseball, and then this might pivot into the coverage of the league. A few years ago, when we moved back east, my wife’s sister and her whole family came to visit us here, and my niece and I were playing catch in the backyard. Not with a baseball, with one of those tennis ball things where you have the sticky pads, and it catches it.
Matthew
Oh, yeah.
Paul
And I forget, maybe she was seven then or something, but it was around the age that I got interested in baseball, and she was getting interested, and she was talking about it, and she was basically like, “Can I play baseball?” I was like, “Yeah, why not?” And she was like, “Well, there’s a boy who says that I can’t play baseball because I’m a girl.” And I’m like, “That’s nonsense. You can do whatever you want. It’d be hard to be a professional baseball player, but he probably won’t be a professional baseball player either, right? It’s just hard. But if you want to play baseball, you can play baseball, and you have to find ways to do it.” And a few years later, her younger brother is playing T-ball or something now, and I think she’s playing softball. So, whatever. But I asked her this summer, just recently, “Do you know about the women’s professional baseball league?” And she was like, “No.” And I’m like, that’s a fail. A girl who’s interested in baseball should know that this exists, because it should be promoted. Both marketed, so that’s some on the league side, and promoted by baseball as a whole, in a way that somebody who sits around watching TikTok should have something pop up somewhere along the way, right?
Matthew
Right.
Paul
And so that was frustrating to me to see. And okay, it’s the first year, all the games are in Illinois, in Springfield, which, my mom finally found out, is because the first paid-entry women’s baseball game was in Springfield.
Matthew
Oh, nice, okay.
Paul
I think she said… what did she say? It was like 1976 [1875].
Matthew
Wow. Okay. So six years after Vassar had the first recorded women’s baseball team. My alma mater.
Paul
Yeah. And so it’s frustrating to me that it felt like the coverage, both from the league’s perspective, marketing themselves, and the coverage by media outlets, was not what I would want it to be for a new league, a nascent league that you want to spread and grow. And it’s a short first season with four teams all in one place, fine. But I would like to see improvement in that regard, because I think that’s how you get there. You can’t just be like, “Oh, we’re gonna do this for a month and a half, see what happens, and then decide whether to keep it going.” It’s like, no, you need a five-to-ten-year plan of, we’re going to invest money in this. And it’s about paying the players and the staff and getting the grounds right and everything, but also making sure that people know it exists. Because how are you gonna grow if people don’t know you’re there?
Matthew
It’s so true. And here we kind of get to the same kind of issues we’ve talked about with women in superhero movies and stuff like that. This is true with a lot of communities that are underrepresented. People will say, “Oh, no one will go see Asian males as romantic leads in big romantic comedies.” Okay, where’s your proof of that? If you don’t make any of those movies, then how are you claiming this?
Paul
Yeah, yeah. Zero divided by zero is not zero. It’s undefined.
Matthew
Or if you make them and release them like… what’s the woman, Riri Williams, who was kind of a woman version of Iron Man?
Paul
Ironheart.
Matthew
Ironheart, thank you. I didn’t think her show was fantastic, but I thought it was really interesting, and I really liked a lot of it, and it got almost no advertising whatsoever.
Paul
I didn’t even know it existed. I know I’ve moved away from watching a lot of MCU stuff, but I knew it was going to be a thing. But I can’t not know that there’s a new Spider-Man movie out, right? It’s in my face everywhere, even though I avoid as much media and ads as possible. There’s so little… maybe there was a Jeopardy question about Ironheart, I don’t know, but there’s so little promotion, right? And then you can’t use that as evidence, like, “Oh, see, this doesn’t work.”
Matthew
Because people do it all the time. That’s like, “Oh, why are we getting more of this nonsense?” And I think it’s the same kind of thing here, because someone might then go and interview a bunch of girls playing Little League and be like, “Did you watch the WPL?”
Paul
WPBL.
Matthew
They need a better acronym. That’s really hard to say. But people like your niece could be like, “No, I didn’t. What’s that?” And I do think it’s worth naming, because you talked about it being good for baseball. The WNBA has in large part been successful, and the fact that it has the letters NBA in its name is not a coincidence. It is completely a project of the NBA. All of the teams play in the same stadiums that men’s teams do and are very linked to them. A lot of their team names are linked. Here in Minnesota, we have the Timberwolves as the men’s team and the Lynx as the women’s team. There’s a lot of other team links like that.
Paul
The Aces were definitely big in Vegas, by the way, having lived there a couple years. That would just be what’s on TV at the poker room, basically.
Matthew
For sure. And so the NBA put huge amounts of money into it. There were a lot of ways where you could buy, like, 10 tickets to New York Knicks games and two tickets to New York Liberty games as a package, and things like that. In some cases, they were really pushing it hard.
Paul
And you can’t get those 10 Knicks tickets unless you get the Liberty.
Matthew
And Major League Baseball has literally nothing to do with what just happened. And there’s some structural reasons for that. Part of why the WNBA is something I think the NBA feels really good about promoting is because it happens when the NBA isn’t in season, because basketball is a 12-month sport, because you play it indoors. And it is important to note that at the time the WNBA was starting, the ABL, I think it was called, a women’s professional basketball league that was totally separate from the NBA, was running at the same time of year and was beginning to become really successful. And the WNBA very intentionally pushed that out of business. Which, by the way, paid women less.
Paul
Less than the ABL did?
Matthew
Yeah, exactly. Odd, because it had so much more sponsorship. So can Major League Baseball argue that it would be creating its own competitor? Sure. But does that argument really hold water when you think about how much it’s gonna just increase the love of the game and people being interested in the game, and thus being interested in all people playing the game, including men? It feels kind of shitty that they didn’t support it, you know?
Paul
Yeah. There were a few articles on MLB.com that you can find through Google search or whatever, but my mom went to MLB.com every day for the last eight months or whatever, right? And she didn’t see a single story just pop up. So they’re buried. They’re on the site somewhere, but it’s not there in your face.
Matthew
And that lets us get to the coverage, because even on ESPN, which was covering the games…
Paul
That was the broadcast partner.
Matthew
You had to hunt for them. If you go to the ESPN.com website, there’s a list across the top of the screen of all the different leagues that they’re covering. And in March, it’ll include the women’s March Madness tournament for college basketball and things like that. It includes a lot of the WNBA. Women’s professional baseball was never to be found. You had to really search, and even some of the search functions didn’t find it the way they should. It was hard to figure out which game was which. The streaming platform itself was awful. It felt like a lot of people going through the motions to say, “Look, we supported this. Oh well, it didn’t work.”
Paul
In defense of ESPN, even during the baseball season, it can be hard to find baseball coverage, because there’s football coverage throughout the summer. You have to search for MLB in the first place. So I think this is a two-fold problem, right? Number one, ESPN just doesn’t seem that interested in baseball overall. And number two, they’re even less interested in women’s baseball, for which they are the sole broadcaster, which is just madness. And then they’d also have games just disappear. I would start watching a game and then pause it and then come back, and it’s like, oh, they just took it off. You paid for all the games, and then they’re like, “No, no, no, we’re getting rid of this game.” It was just very frustrating. It happened to my mom a number of times as well.
Matthew
Or it wouldn’t list the games by date and stuff like that. And granted, the MLB.com app, which is where a lot of people stream baseball games, especially if you’re out of town, like both me and Paul are for the Mets, is not perfect by any means, but it’s still much easier to stream games later, or to know exactly what the games were.
Paul
We watched them through ESPN ourselves, though, and that is a horrible platform.
Matthew
ESPN is just a bad platform in some ways, but then also the coverage just wasn’t very good.
Paul
Really early on, there was an announcer who was very hard to listen to, to the point where my mom, who really wanted to love it, muted it at points. They got rid of that announcer and moved her to another role, and there were a couple announcers that she really did appreciate. They had AJ Andrews and Jennifer Sarah, but they had AJ Andrews doing sort of secondary play-by-play in the stands, consistently, on every play. She would basically say almost what the… and it sounded a little bit like they were broadcasting for radio, the way they were describing things. The broadcast itself left a lot to be desired, and then the promotion of the broadcast left a lot to be desired. In terms of the broadcast itself, I feel like there probably wasn’t a lot of rehearsal, right? They didn’t really have a full spring training. They arrived the week before and maybe played some scrimmages or whatever. I don’t know. So I can understand that the production took a while to get up to par, or hasn’t yet, and hopefully in future years it will continue to improve. If we look at the actual play on the field, the defense early on was really shaky, and then a week or two or three later, there were some games that were really well played defensively. And there were some standouts also. But the point being, there’s a phrase, mid-season form, right? If your season’s only a month long, that applies to the broadcast too. Spring training is spring training for broadcasters too, but in MLB they get a month and a half to practice. Here, I don’t know, maybe they had a couple games that weren’t broadcast. So in terms of the broadcasting, to me that’s a start, and as long as it’s taken as the starting point, and then let’s try and grow from there and improve from there, to me, fine, right? Whereas the promotion, to me, is malfeasance. That’s just gross negligence on the part of these companies, really. It’s not necessarily one individual. It’s just the company, the structure, doesn’t care enough.
Matthew
Well, I think more than anything, what it felt like was, okay, this is not gonna generate much money, and we’re gonna do what that amount of money can pay us to do. There isn’t a sense of, you know what, we can play a role in helping this grow.
Paul
Yeah, we can make an investment in the future, especially.
Matthew
Right. And that sounds like I’m saying it in a kind of altruistic way. And yes, I do think there is some level of, ESPN says that they care about growing sports for everyone, so you should care about women in sports and things like that. But also, that’s what investing is. There’s a lot of sports where ESPN said, “Look, right now, no one cares about the logging competitions that are held in New Hampshire every year, but we’re going to put some money into broadcasting this and finding some people who will talk about it in fun ways.” And of course they lost money for a couple of years. But then for a while they were making money on it, and then eventually they got to drop it, because I think now it’s probably on some ESPN… what, 16? I don’t know how many networks they have.
Paul
The Ocho.
Matthew
But for a while, before they could start getting the big NBA contracts and NFL contracts, that’s the kind of stuff that was on ESPN, because they invested in it and thought, we’re not going to make any money on it this year, but we’ll build an audience for it. There was an opportunity to build an audience for women’s professional baseball, and clearly ESPN had no interest in that.
Paul
Yeah, exactly. And it can be altruistic, right? It can be, we’re trying to make the world a better place. Sure, no reason not to do that. But you’re a big corporation, so you’re kind of not allowed to do that, because you have to satisfy your investors or whatever. But there’s still a very real argument, as long as you have a long-term broadcasting contract, right? That may be a little bit on the league, where I think they got that sorted right at the last minute, so I don’t know if they have any kind of long-term contract. But if you have a one-year contract, and it’s, okay, we’re getting this much money to do this, okay, they’re not going to invest in the future. But if you have a longer-term contract, or even if you don’t, just the idea is that it’s not like season one or two or three have to be the ones that make a lot of money. If you build it, they will come.
Matthew
Right, exactly. Talk a bit about what your mother’s experience was watching, because I want to transition us into A League of Their Own, but let’s start with that. I know your mom had a lot to say about this season.
Paul
One of the things she said was, first of all, that she really enjoyed being able to watch women play baseball, right? That was really cool, and it was something she would have wanted when she was a kid or a young adult, to have an idea that that’s a thing she could do, right? Whether or not she would have ended up actually doing that. I was really interested in baseball until I was 13 or so, and then not so much, right? People change interests. But just having that as a pathway, as something you can look at and be like, “Oh, I could do that,” right? But then she also said that she felt it was a little bit like going to see me play Little League. Not in terms of quality of play, but in terms of really wanting it to go well, and just, okay, don’t mess it up, don’t mess it up. Because of that investment in it. It’s proof of concept.
Matthew
You don’t want it to be a mess, so that the idiot guys are gonna come along and say, “See, women can’t play baseball.”
Paul
Right. And then on top of that, just getting interested in the individual players, right? Everybody has their own personality, and you really do get to know them when you watch a season of baseball. And she didn’t watch every single game. She watched, I think, somewhere around 16, 17 games, plus some partials, but every postseason game. And she really wanted the Hunters to win a game at some point, and they were really having a hard time. And some of the players seemed a bit self-conscious, which is understandable, given national media or whatever. But then others, like Mo’ne Davis and Sato, who was the 36-year-old pitcher from Japan who’s won the MVP three times in some women’s baseball international competition, and threw a complete game shutout, oh, spoilers, threw a complete game shutout in the championship game, game five out of five in the final, which was awesome. Some of them just looked very natural on the field, just like ballplayers. And then she said that, as a woman, she felt a little guilty seeing Eric Young, who’s a Major League Baseball player, and Matt Williams, and feeling that there’s some sort of validation in these smart players who’ve made a lot of money and been on World Series-winning teams, either as a player or as a coach. She kind of felt weird feeling that, to see these recognizable names.
Matthew
And the two you just mentioned were coaches of the women’s teams. They were managers.
Paul
They managed the two teams who got to the championship, right? There was a managerial firing, which is hilarious.
Matthew
Yep, after three games. And there was one trade.
Paul
There was a trade, yeah. A manager-initiated trade between Eric Young and Coach Rocky, who was the one woman manager, who’s apparently been a really big deal in women’s baseball in the United States. And I think it’s important to acknowledge, this is a professional baseball league where they’re getting paid to play, but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been women’s baseball in the United States. There just hasn’t been one organized on this level, where it’s, okay, we’re trying to make it a product, basically, is what it is, right? But yeah, she really enjoyed it. One wish she had is that they didn’t use composite bats and would use wood bats, right? And this is something where the women’s game is different from professional… I don’t even want to call it men’s baseball, because I don’t think there’s a rule where women can’t be in it.
Matthew
Yeah, I think it’s like the color line, in that there’s no official rule. It’s just generally accepted that it won’t happen.
Paul
Right, exactly. And the number one draft pick, Kelsie Whitmore, did play in the independent leagues, which are mostly male. And the Mets had pitchers who they just yoinked out of the independent leagues. This is a thing where players are going from the independent leagues to the major leagues now. But in the major leagues, everybody uses wooden bats, right? In college baseball, men’s college baseball, they use metal bats and maybe composite bats. I’m not sure.
Matthew
And to be clear, it’s an issue because wooden bats break on a fairly regular basis, and that’s expensive.
Paul
Is that the main issue?
Matthew
That’s what I’ve always been told. I mean, you don’t use metal bats at the professional level because you’d kill people.
Paul
Yeah, yeah. You’d hit the ball 125 miles an hour or something.
Matthew
Right, but in terms of why at the college level, yeah, North Carolina and some of the other top universities that have really good programs could probably afford wooden bats. But getting a hundred colleges that play in NCAA Division One to all have however many wooden bats they go through, it would become a pretty significant budget thing. I don’t know.
Paul
I’ll take your word for it, but the main thing to me is just: hit ball with metal bat, ball go far. Hit with wood bat, it doesn’t. Like you said, you’d kill people, and people have been seriously injured, right? Somebody had their face broken by a foul ball off a wooden bat recently in the major leagues. And with the composite bats, there were a lot of home runs, right? The regular season was 15 games long, and there were two women with 11 each. That’s a lot of home runs in 15 games. So it was very much a hitter’s league, is what you would say. And they also had this turtleback field, which my mom didn’t like. One player blew out her ACL, I believe, as a result of it. I’m not sure of the exact details. The turtleback field, basically, is… usually the pitcher pitches off a mound, which is a little bit raised above the rest of the field. That’s true here, but then the whole infield is also raised higher than the rest of the field, something about drainage. So when you’re going from the infield to the outfield, you’re going downhill on a little stretch, and that’s dangerous. And you could see there were some balls that were dropped as a result of it. But also, you can just get hurt, and people did. And injuries are a part of the game, right? Any sport, you’re gonna have injuries. But one of the things my mom said, aside from wishing they would use wooden bats, was that it would be nice to see what the fielding looks like on a better surface, a flat surface. If you go to maybe a major league stadium, maybe a minor league stadium, whatever. Not to dunk on this field, right? But the fact that it had the hill, like, what are we playing in, Houston, Minute Maid Park?
Matthew
Yeah, as I said, the fact that it’s an outdoor sport means that all of the pre-built good fields are almost entirely in use at this time. You could maybe actually do it on college fields during the summer. But anyway, I don’t want to get too into that. But I think it’s one more example of the chicken-and-egg thing of, “Oh, but here are these things I didn’t like about it, and so I don’t want to give it money.” The thing you didn’t like would be fixed with money.
Paul
Right, exactly. And I feel the opposite. Whatever I saw that I didn’t like this year is just something that I want to see improved in the future, not something that makes me go, “Oh, I don’t want to watch this again.” So I’ll definitely watch next year, assuming I’m watching any baseball. And I expect there will be improvements, right? That’s normal. And I think with anything like this, where somebody’s starting something new and it’s a big project, a certain amount of patience is called for. Appreciate the positives, acknowledge the negatives, and don’t focus on them all the time, but make sure they’re out there, like, “Hey, we’d like to see this, that, and the other improved,” and there’s a better chance that they will be. But also, some of the games were just really fun to watch. There were some blowouts, which aren’t my favorite, but there were some back-and-forth seesaw things. There was a walk-off grand slam. It’s just people who love baseball getting paid to play baseball. And the last game was a complete game shutout. That’s classic baseball, an instant classic kind of ending. Not the way you would contrive it in a Hollywood movie, like, say, A League of Their Own, where you get a couple of lead changes and that kind of drama. But that game especially, I was just like, this is a good baseball game.
Matthew
Yeah, I mean, you could make a movie about it, where Sato is thinking about her romantic relationships and whether she’s gonna retire from baseball, and then you’ve got For Love of the Game with Kevin Costner.
Paul
Sure.
Matthew
I’m saying it is a movie about a game that is just a pitching performance.
Paul
Yes, exactly. A very different baseball movie from all the others, I’d say, for sure.
Matthew
We were also gonna talk about the movie A League of Their Own. We’re at just about an hour already, so I don’t think we need to actually do a whole thing on that. But Paul, you wanted to talk a little bit about the movie, what you thought about it when it came out, and what you thought about it watching it again now.
Paul
Yeah, I’d say I enjoyed it when it came out, and I enjoyed it now. I don’t think it’s a perfect movie. A lot of my complaints about the movie are just about it as a movie. But I also think there’s parts that are funny. There’s parts where I think they handle some heavy stuff well. There’s parts where they maybe kind of lampshade things instead of really getting into them. And I think that was fine. I think it was the right movie for 1992, probably. I think it was really interesting that they had the two leads, well, the manager and then the star player, not really being emotionally invested in the league and its success. I think that was an interesting choice. At first I was kind of like, why would you do that? And then I thought, maybe the idea is that the audience might not be emotionally invested in the idea of this league, and so it’s taking some people on that journey. One character doesn’t have to choose baseball, because that’s just not what she wants. But then another, who seemed less likely to be the one who would get into it, was like, “No, I want to stay here and manage here,” and maybe that takes some of the audience on that journey of, hey, this is a worthwhile thing to do. And it didn’t focus a ton on the baseball itself, I felt. But overall I’d say it was a good movie. I enjoyed it, and I’m glad that it got made, because, I mean, it took 30 years to go from there to here, right? But it’s probably important. It helped get recognition for a lot of baseball players who had to that point been short on recognition and now get referenced all the time.
Matthew
Yeah, I think that’s a good way of describing it. I had some trouble watching the movie this time. I think a lot of it has not aged well. Part of that is just the music is so, oh my god, late 80s, early 90s. But also some plot elements, you kind of look at them and you’re like, yikes.
Paul
I was definitely watching it thinking, “Ah, Matthew’s gonna say this part didn’t age well.”
Matthew
Yeah, exactly. But I think it also highlighted some of both the successes of the time and some of the problems. It is a fact that it was an all-white league, because baseball was all white at that point.
Paul
But they had Irish, Matthew. They had Irish and Swedes.
Matthew
Irish and Swedes, and a Canadian. Who can imagine it?
Paul
This is in the song.
Matthew
And one of the moments that’s lampshaded is something with a Black woman who’s clearly good at baseball but is not on that team. But all those women were sent to charm school and beauty school. And it was kind of nice being reminded of that, and then seeing, in this league today, their uniforms look like uniforms. They’re not playing in skirts. A lot of the players in women’s athletics, and this is by no means all, but it’s certainly fairly common, a lot of the women in the league are queer, and that was highlighted. Women were shown with their romantic partners, of all the genders that were happening for them, in the women’s professional league. In a way that, yeah, it has been researched that a number of the women in that original league were queer. Some of them actually met each other and then had relationships that lasted 50, 70 years afterwards. None of that’s in the movie. I know a show was made a couple years ago that I want to watch at some point. That was probably highlighted there. I don’t love the movie, but I’m really glad the movie was made. And I do know that it was a very important movie. There’s a couple of people I follow on TikTok who talk a lot about women’s sports and it being important to them, and through one of them, Coach Jackie, if anyone knows her on TikTok, wonderful account, definitely follow it, she posted about the women’s professional league, and that’s what got me to notice it. But she and a number of the people who follow her, and other commentators, have all talked about how this movie was so important to them, as an inspiration and as a knowledge that women’s sports has always been here, and has always had a lot of things that need to improve, and a lot of it’s about shitty men getting out of the way and helping and stuff like that. Getting out of the way or helping. So I think we could do a whole thing on the movie or the TV show, maybe at some later point. But it’s not my favorite movie. I’m really glad that a movie about that time existed. I think, especially for the time, it did a lot of things really well, both in terms of how it showed the baseball and how it showed the characters. We commented that Madonna gets to play a character who is very sexually open, and the movie doesn’t punish her in any way for it. And also she doesn’t fall in love with someone, or fall in love with baseball and realize that it’s filling the hole that she was trying to fill with drinking and sex. I mean, she’s playing with Rosie O’Donnell, so she wasn’t even doing anything else. But it’s kind of great for a movie of that time, or today. But yeah, I’m glad the movie exists. Probably glad the show exists. I haven’t seen it, but I would like to. And really glad this professional league exists, and I’m really hoping that it exists next season.
Paul
Yeah, me too. And the last thing I’ll say about A League of Their Own is: intentionally walk Dottie. What are you doing? Pitching to her there? Second and third, one-run lead, best player up at the plate. Come on. What are we doing?
Matthew
Yeah, clearly the right move.
Paul
Yeah. And then in terms of the coverage, I did just want to mention one thing. Shout-out to FanGraphs, which I think has the best baseball analysis on the internet. They did a weekly article that was really breaking down a bunch of the best things, a few good-faith criticisms, and some of the historical firsts, like the first runner getting thrown out going from first to third on a single, or something. So to me that was a shining light in the darkness of the lack of coverage. It was just baseball coverage. It felt like the same way they would cover the Arizona Fall League or the Major League Baseball playoffs. Just, we’re gonna talk about these games, because they’re baseball games, and we talk about baseball. So I think it was really cool that they had legit dedicated coverage of it, which seems to be lacking on other major sites.
Matthew
Definitely. No, I thought that was really great. And I’m glad you pointed that out to me, because again, I would not have known that.
Paul
Right. They’re not broadly marketed. You know FanGraphs and you see FanGraphs, and you’re like, okay. Cool. All right.
Matthew
Well, this has been great. Obviously, we’ve gotten pretty far off from where we started in terms of superhero ethics, but as we pointed out with the Riri Williams stuff, there’s a lot of similar dynamics. But also, we’re getting into this kind of stuff because we’ve covered a lot. This is, I think, episode 413. And that’s why this is maybe a good time for us to take a pause and say, you know what, let’s look at what we’ve done with Superhero Ethics. Let’s build a framework of analysis and use that to look at some of our favorite characters. Let us know who you think those should be, and then we’ll start rolling it out pretty soon. We might have a one- or two-week hiatus, or we may just be able to go right into it. We will let you know. But either way, Paul, thank you so much for being a part of this. To all who are listening, thank you too. Let’s play ball.
